Structure and Imagery

Dale McNeil Material Will: Force in Form Opening Reception: April 3, 6 - 8 PM April 3 - May 31, 2015 Tops Gallery is pleased to present Material Will: Force In Form an exhibition of new work by Memphis based painter Dale McNeil. This will be McNeil's first solo exhibition at Tops Gallery. The artist offers 19 paintings and works on paper which explores his fundamental material's appetition to form. To produce these works the artist employs a self referential process that begins with degraded photocopies of unique works as a basis for a new image. The decomposition of one image is crucial to the birth of another. Both random and planned actions are used in equal measure to manifest an obscure organization of esoteric symbols veiled by layers of distortion. The result is painted form compromised by disorder and struggling for definition. The works offer few clues to the original source material, allowing the paintings to exist in a transformative st...

Installation view.   you said something i've never forgotten (left) and  trying to get over From the Press Release: Theodore:Art is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings and wall work by Jack Davidson. Retinal Noise. Everything is related. The community and the arena of life are the boundaries of expression of what, in modern times, we knew as privacy. We have now fallen into a social network which surprises both for its flexibility and for its tendency towards an enormous abyss of meaning. Painting in this time of the present-continuous cruelly confronts the communicative core of reality. It prefers a direct relationship with the world, one without degrees of separation. It is important to see how an ever increasingly anachronistic medium, with regard to the dictatorship of immediacy, renders us disobedient. The epidermis of the world’s retina, which is how we can refer to Jack Davidson’s work, is conscious of strangeness and belon...

Albert Irvin by © Josh Wright Very sorry to hear of the passing of one of my favorite painters, Albert Irvin  -  an incredible painter and by all accounts a wonderful man. The evocative portrait above is by Josh Wright . Obituary in the Guardian . In the Studio with Albert Irvin by Sam Cornish  from 2012. Interview : John Jones London 

240 , 2013, gelatin silver print, 24 x 20 inches. From the Press Release: Ducklo has lived and worked in Memphis, Tennessee for the past five years, having returned after a decade in New York City. The photographs on view arose from indiscriminate night drives he began to take in Memphis. Gradually, photographing became part of these excursions turning the open drive into a restless search. Taking advantage of nocturnal stillness to explore the city, Ducklo found a rich topology of light, shadow, and silence, touchstones among the uncanny.  Against this backdrop, Ducklo shows us varied pictures that include neighborhoods, parking lots, a jail, a school gym, the densely forested city park, a public sculpture, and a bus stop. Many of the pictures presented depict church vans, secured in cages, protected from theft. This recurring signpost of confinement and protection acts as a refrain to the diverse images of a city at night. The language within Ducklo's work rev...

  Installation view of work by Kazuo Shiraga. Detail from above. Detail from above. From the Press Release: Body and Matter: The Art of Kazuo Shiraga and Satoru Hoshino  is curated by Koichi Kawasaki, former director of Ashiya City Museum of Art and History in Japan. This exhibition places a group of 23 important abstract paintings made over the course of the fifty-year career of legendary Gutai artist Kazuo Shiraga, in dialogue with a series of nine works from the 1990s by Satoru Hoshino, . . . . 

Artist, Debra Ramsay takes a closer look. Detail of work (on left) from photo above. From the Press Release: Petzel Gallery is delighted to announce the inauguration of our new uptown location with an exhibition of early paintings by Charline von Heyl. The group of paintings assembled was previously exhibited in Cologne and Munich between 1991 and 1995, before the artist moved to New York. This will be the first showing of the work in the United States. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalog with an interview between Isabelle Graw and the artist. Cologne in the late 1980s was dominated by a debate about the merits and pitfalls of painting. If there was any point of agreement, it was in rejection of the mythic landscapes of Anselm Kiefer and the gestural marks of the internationally acclaimed neo-expressionists. However esoteric the arguments about painting may seem today, they helped clarify a skeptical position on painterly authenticity that wa...

A still of Leonard Whiting in Romeo and Juliet (1968) Hi Friends, While I gratefully appreciate all who check out my blog posts and take the time to comment I have decided I will no longer publish comments posted anonymously. Everyone has been respectful in their remarks towards me and the work and artists I post but frankly, I just think it's polite to let everyone know who we are conversing with. I realize it's quicker to post an anonymous comment than to sign in to blogger so, even when using the Anonymous option , I will ask that you please sign your post and perhaps leave a link so we can all check out your art or your own blog. Take care and thanks again for looking!

Aqua Same , 1962, alkyd resin on canvas, 66 3/4 x 62 3/4 in. Walter Darby Bannard: Minimal Color Field Paintings 1958 - 1965 Opening: Thursday, March 19, 6 - 8 PM March 19 - April 18, 2015 Berry Campbell 530 W 24th Street New York, NY 10011

Material Will: Force In Form New Paintings by Dale McNeil Opening April 3, 6 - 8 PM April 3 - May 31, 2015 Tops  400 South Front Street Memphis, TN 38103 info@topsgallery.com 901.340.0134

There is a special juror for this year's show, in honor of USI's 50th Anniversary. Matthew Neil Gehring is an Evansville native who graduated from North High School and came to USI on the Robert Carrithers Freshman Art Scholarship, graduating in 1998 with a BS in studio art. After earning his MFA from the University of Delaware, he taught at Humboldt State University, Syracuse University, and currently is the Chair of the Visual Arts Department and Director of the Flecker Gallery at SUNY Suffolk. Gehring maintains an active studio practice in Brooklyn, New York. His work has encompassed ceramics, sculpture, conceptual art, and most recently painting. University of Southern Indiana  Forum II, FA2 8600 University Blvd. Evansville, IN 47712 812.228.5006

 Debra Ramsay   (detail from work above)   Installation view From the Press Release: While their color palettes generate an immediate sense of relationship, Paik arrives at his intuitively, while Ramsay’s is system-based. The artists share a generative process of making, a cultivation of a standardized element that is repeated and worked. In Alex’s case, it’s a geometric form, a unit that he multiplies and folds, orients or otherwise uses again and again to make the work. Debra walked a specific trail, collecting colors every hundred steps via photographs, once each season, generating a palette of 72 distinct colors that were worked in a variety of ways. Both artists consider the element of time. Paik’s work changes as you change your viewing angle; Ramsay documents color change at one location over the year, as an absurd time keeping device. Alex Paik  Alex Paik About the Artists: Alex Paik was born ...

Willow, 2014, oil on MDF board, 60 x 56.5 cm. From the Artist's Statement: The exhibition is the result of my fascination for different types of landscape depictions. The opera "Atys", which was written by Jean Baptiste Lully in 1676, is one of those sources which served as my inspiration. Briefly, the story takes place at Cybèles holy mountain ( goddess ) and in the final scene Atys takes his own life as a result of the Gods nasty game with humanity. Atys is celebrated and praised by all for his faithfulness and virtue, and his reward is to be reborn as "a tree that never loses its color despite the severest cold, and when it burns, get the brightest flames". Atys was reborn as a pine tree. The imagery in my paintings tells of an intrusive painting, where the veins of the leaf, branches and crowns against the sky are smudged or stylized and simplified. The expressions in the various pictures are similar, as if the tree’s own membership i...

Brenda Goodman with her painting Stone Memories , 2014. The work is currently on view at the American Academy of Arts and Letters as part of the institution's annual Invitational. Brenda Goodman has been making absolutely rock solid, furiously alive paintings since the 1960s. She has poured out her soul and spilled her guts into every single work. And though she has been known by many for years to be shimmering skilled and tough as nails, she only recently for the first time sold out an exhibition. Now, on the occasion of her solo show at Life on Mars and simultaneous inclusion in the American Academy Invitational, let this be the occasion for some serious Brenda Goodman momentum. No one around paints like her, with such unapologetically personal stakes . . . Goodman’s body of work stands apart, invaluable, unique, pushing above the canopy, its roots digging deep into the soil, its twisting branches drooping with amazing new fruit. - David Brody, from his ca...

A Tree for Peter , 2013, oil on panel, 12 x 11 inches. Into December: Red Hook, Brooklyn , 2014, oil on panel, 12 x 11 inches. October's End, Red Hook, Brooklyn , 2014, oil on panel, 12 x 11 in. Late Winter: Red Hook, Brooklyn , 2014, oil on panel, 15 x 20 inches. David Pollack is a Brooklyn based painter and musician. From his studio in Red Hook he paints encrusted works that are much more sublime than that adjective implies.  His surfaces can be gemlike or move towards the monochrome but both evoke the light and élan found in the  glistening  seasons and environments that inspire them. Framed Winter Paintings , 2014 Into September: Red Hook, Brooklyn , 2014, oil on panel, 9 x 8 inches. From the Artist's Statement: If an artist comes to nature quietly and humbly, he will always walk away with the answer. To me, that is the secret of painting (and making any kind of art for that matter).  So, ...

 Installation view with Sol LeWitt and Carl Andre   Sol LeWitt   Installation view Dan Flavin Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Sol Lewitt Through March 7, 2015 Paula Cooper Gallery 534 W 21st Street New York, NY 10011